In her
prefatory note to Circles of Sorrow, Line of Struggle: The Novels
of ToniMorrison Gurleen Grewal says: “Novels such as
The Bluest Eye show me something I had always suspected but
never fully realized, either in literature or in the ways of reading
I had been taught: the saving power of narrative, its capacity to
open a door, to point out the fire and the fire escape – in
short, the profound work that narrative can do for the social
collective, and the work that such a narrative in turn demands from
us”(x). The profound quality of such a narrative, its saving power
to resist readers to accept any single ‘truth’ and also urging them
to remake the ‘truth’, so long inferred, is one of the most
remarkable and unique features of Morrison’s fictional projects.
Literary texts that reflect representational ‘truth’ of
history/trauma influence readers in reshaping and remaking their
thoughts, which is done not by the autonomous and deterministic
closure of the narrative but by its power of igniting imagination.
In her Nobel Lecture (1993) Morrison has told, “Narrative is
radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.” The
pedagogic process of making and remaking of meaning forms a new
representation of historical ‘reality’, which contributes to make a
new social text. The significance of writer-reader venture in
remaking History/Sociology has been pointed out by the griot in the
final part of Morrison’s Nobel acceptance speech “‘Finally,’ she
says, ‘I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in
your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is,
this thing we have done – together.’”(Peterson 272, 273).

The
purpose of the following essay is to further the research line by
making a detailed analysis on how a narrative widens a reader’s
skill of evaluation by developing a new approach in him, who by
making a new meaning out of it remakes the narrative and offers a
new representation. In my project I will attempt to show how
telling and retelling of stories work as healing therapy for those
who go through painful experiences of history and trauma. In
particular I want to focus on Jazz (1992), Morrison’s sixth
novel because the novel registers a collaborative/mutual space
between speaker and listener, writer and reader, who in their joint
venture of surveying the past, the African American social history,
forge a livable present and a viable future. In short, my article
is an in-depth study on a new social text, offered by Jazz,
that challenges a single, unified ‘truth’ and presents
multidimensional ‘truth’ in its scrutinized exploration of everyday
life as it is ‘lived’ by black people, particularly by the black
women. My project is an endeavor to demonstrate that the new text in
Jazz is a fictional representation of the story of black
women, which seems to be historically more ‘real’ and more
‘authentic’ than the documents, presented from the perspective of
power merchants.

Jazz
is a sequel to Beloved in recalling a traumatized past.
Morrison has presented in front of public a painful past, history of
dispossession and loss not in the manner of a chronicle historian
but as a therapeutic historian/sociologist. The avoidance of a
painful history or its suppression can not heal the traumatized but
often makes the victim behave in
misbalanced
and unruly manner which may cause further pain and that can be
threatening for social and political arrangements. Regarding the
effect of trauma Cathy Caruth points out, “Since the traumatic event
is not experienced as it occurs, it is fully evident only in
connection with another place, and in another time” (Trauma
8). Jazz opens with the gossiping voice of a narrator who
presents casually in front of readers some facts of Joe and Violet’s
hard case:

Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on
Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an
eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deep down, spooky love that
made him so sad and happy he shot her just so keep the feelings
going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to
see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor
and out of the church (3).

Very soon the readers are informed that the case is not registered
juridically “because nobody actually saw him do it, and the dead
girl’s aunt didn’t want to throw money to helpless lawyers or
laughing cops when she knew the expense wouldn’t improve anything.
Violet’s misbalancing/unruly behaviour is not considered esteemed
enough to regard her as “someone needing assistance” by “Salem
Women’s Club”. So, Joe-Violet case demands a careful study, a
different hearing/counter hearing, in order to write a different
social text by a responsible reader. Readers’ position is like that
of Violet who is “left . . . to figure out on her own what the
matter was and how to fix it” (4). It is not a question “. . . who
shot whom” (6) that matters but its investigation, a different,
critical investigation that must be adopted to bring a therapeutic
solution not only for the particular victims but also for those who
suffer the traumas of history. In the novel the present occupies a
space of absence with a sense of loss and abandonment; what is
traumatic is the repetition of the violent past Joe and Violet left
behind. Jazz as its name signifies, supplies readers solos,
duets, trios and also a mediator, some Ms. Know-all, mysterious
narrator. The reader should be alert not to let the traumatic past
encompass the present. In order to release the present from the
trap of past a retrospective/re-imaginative pattern of
individual/collective stories must be told and retold both by
speakers and listeners. Toni Morrison once said, “The only thing I
can do, and have done, and will do is somehow to incorporate into
the world that horror you feel when something awful happens, to
redistribute the moral problem so other people can have this
connection with another’s pain. That what art does. It manages
that kind of horror; it makes it possible for the person to go on” (qtd.
in Walsh). It is not only the moment of the traumatic event that is
critical but passing out of it also becomes a crisis for those who
undergo trauma. The survivors are possessed with the horrible
memory of that repressed past and the only genuine exorcism lies in
collective hearing.

Jazz
like Beloved was inspired by a real document, Morrison had
read in Camille Billop’s manuscript, The Harlem Book of the Dead,
which contains photographs and commentary by the great African
American photographer James Van Der Jee. Van Der Jee narrated to
Camille Billops the peculiar origin of the photograph of a young
woman’s corpse thus:

She was the one I think was shot by her sweetheart at a party with a
noiseless gun. She complained of being sick at the party and
friends said, “Well, why don’t you lay down?” and they taken her in
the room and laid her down. After they undressed her and loosened
her clothes, they saw the blood on her dress. They asked her about
it and she said, “I’ll tell you tomorrow, yes, I’ll tell you
tomorrow.” She was just trying to give him a chance to get (qtd.in
Henry Louis Gates, jr. 53).

The young woman rescued her lover by refusing to identify him. The
mystery of such love, which is of course a woman’s love, moved
Morrison. She protected the seedling of this story line, nurtured
it carefully until her creative mind bloomed it into Jazz.
In her 1985 interview with Gloria Naylor Morrison explained that she
was obsessed by two or three little fragments of stories which she
heard from different places; one was a newspaper clipping about a
woman called Margaret Garner, a run away slave woman who had killed
her daughter to save her from enslavement and another was the
funeral story, mentioned above. Both are the stories of black women
and their sacrifices: one gives up her self for her child and the
other sacrifices it for her lover. About the inter-relation between
these two stories, Morrison explained to Naylor in the same
interview:

Now what made those stories connect, I can’t explain, but . . . in
both instances, something seemed clear to me. A woman loved
something other than herself so much. She had placed all of the
value of her life in something outside herself. That the woman who
killed her children loved her children so much; they were the best
part of her and she would not see them hurt . . . . And that the
woman had loved a man or had such affection for a man that she would
postpone her own medical care or go ahead and die to give him time
to get away so that, more valuable than her life, was not just her
life but something else connected with his life. . .

Morrison also explained to Naylor what made her interested in those
two separate stories in which she noticed certain correlation:

.
. . what it is that really compels a good woman to displace the
self, her self. So what I started doing and thinking about for a
year was to project the self not into the way we say “yourself”, but
to put a space between those words as though the self were really a
twin or a thirst or a friend or something that sits
right next to you and watches you, which is what I was talking about
when I said “the dead girl.” So I had just protected her out in the
earth. . . . So I just imagined the life of a dead girl which was
the girl that Margaret Garner killed, the baby girl that she killed
(208).

In her way of rewriting the history of black women, Morrison depends
largely on her power of imagination. In order to make the story of
textual traces like The Black Book or Harlem Book of the
Dead more ‘real’ she has great confidence on her power of
fictional representation. The ‘dead girl’ image is an all
encompassing issue of Morrison’s project of reclamation. By
imagining the life of the ‘dead girl’, Margaret killed, Morrison
wants to focus on the interior region of her people, especially that
of black women and thus she makes her new representation of black
women’s tales of love, betrayal, dispossession and death.

This ‘dead girl’ image is the embodiment of absence/loss that
engulfs the present in Jazz. In the first few pages of the
novel the narrator supplies almost all the information: the thirty
years’ troubled marital status of Joe and Violet, Joe’s shooting of
the eighteen year old girl Dorcas, with whom Joe had fallen in love,
Violet’s revenge in defacing the corpse, her craving for a baby that
almost led her to ‘stealing’ a baby (21), the ‘restless nights’
(13), passed by Joe and Violet after the incident etc. When the
readers think that there is nothing left to know about the tragic
triangulated love affair, the narrative takes a sudden twist with
“Good luck and let me know.” Violet decides to gather the
information of Dorcas because she thinks that she would “. . . solve
the mystery of love that way.” So she questioned everybody: from
Malvonne, an upstairs neighbour she came to know that her apartment
was used as ‘a love nest’ by Joe and Dorcas; the legally licensed
beauticians informed her “what kind of lip rogue the girl wore;” (5)
and finally she reached to Alice Manfred, Dorcas’s aunt, who showed
the girl’s picture to Violet and also allowed her to keep it for a
few weeks (6). Violet kept the photo on the fireplace mantle. Now
this photograph like an isolated historical document such as the Van
Der Zee photograph becomes the most necessary thing for them to pass
their ‘restless nights’(13), that does not tell them what they need
to know but ignites in them a keen desire to know a distant past
which would probably help them to comprehend their present
situation:

And a dead girl’s face has become a necessary thing for their nights
. . . . What seems like the only living presence in the house: . . .
. If the tiptoer is Joe Trace, driven by loneliness from his wife’s
side, then the face stares at him without hope or regret and it is
the absence of accusation that wakes him from his sleep hungry for
her company. No finger points . . . . But if the tiptoer is
Violet the photograph is not that at all. . . . It is the face of a
sneak who glides over to your sink to rinse the fork you have laid
by her plate. An inward face - whatever it sees is its own
self. You are there, it says, I am looking at you (12-13).

The “dead girl” becomes an “inward face” of both Violet and Joe,
watching them curiously as though “a twin or thirst or a friend. . .
” (Interview with Gloria Naylor 208). Thus Dorcas who is no more in
the present encompasses both Joe and Violet in such a manner that
they themselves have become an embodiment of the ‘dead
girl’/absence/loss/dispossession. Their present epitomizes what
they have lost, which they want to forget. But forgetting a
history, whether it is of an individual or that of a collective
cannot be a solution for the traumatized; it must be brought into
daylight to represent in a new text of (sociology) with its
reconstructed meaning for the healing of the traumatized.

Jazz
opens in 1926, when Harlem seems to be the centre of a new
historical era. In the novel the narrator expresses the mood and
feelings, generated with the approach of the new era with her strong
fascination for the city, which she emphasizes with capital ‘C’:
“I’m crazy about this City.” Then she goes on illustrating its
charm with a note of enthusiasm:

City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be
another one. . . . At last, at last, everything’s ahead. The smart
ones say so and people listening to them and what they write down
agree: Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff.
The bad stuff. . . . History is over, you all, and everything’s
ahead at last. (7)

‘History’ here refers to painful experience of slavery that had
happened with black people in past; it is something to be forgotten;
its ‘sad stuff’ and ‘bad stuff’ must be left behind. This passage
sums up the “philosophy of New Negro, as envisioned by Harlem
leaders” (Grewal 121). But in reality the ‘smart one’ and the ‘new’
are the black intellectuals of the urban North, the cosmopolitan
elite class in Harlem Renaissance, the prototype of white
superiority, who are far away from the rural black masses, who were
migrated in the city for the betterment of their lives. The
narrator says, “The wave of black people running from want and
violence crested in the 1870s; ‘80s; the ‘90s but was a steady
stream in 1906 when Joe and Violet joined it” (33). Hazel Carby
points out in Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of
Afro-American WomanNovelist, “the overwhelming majority
of blacks were in the South, at a vast physical and metaphorical
distance from those intellectuals who represent the interest of the
race. After the war, black intellectuals had to confront the black
masses on the streets of their cities and responded in a variety of
ways” (164).

Jazz
highlights a wide gap between what seemed to be the fulfilment of
all desires, a keynote to Harlem Renaissance and what it turned out
practically. The novel revises the image of “New Negro”, a
reference that might be connected to Alain Lock’s important
collection in 1925, The NewNegro. The formation of
subjectivity of the Negro and that of his identity was the dynamic
force of the Jazz Age. His identity was to be formed not according
to the perception of whites as intellectually and spiritually
inferior being but as a ‘Man’. This image of “New Negro” is
replaced by working class men and women, whose status are totally
different from the glamorous position of the writers and musicians,
patronized by whites. Joe Trace is a door to door salesman of
Cleopatra beauty products. Before he starts selling cosmetic goods
he “cleaned fish at night and toilets in the day” (127); his wife
does hair; Malvonne cleans offices and Alice is a seamstress. More
often the novel conveys a strong sense of a promised land for
African Americans in Harlem but they rarely have an access to the
spheres of social, economic and educational opportunities. The
narrative voice points out the inequities which were prominent in
the city thus:

.
. . everything you want is right where you are: the church, the
store, the party, the women, the man, the postbox (but no high
schools), the furniture store, street newspaper vendors, the bootleg
houses,(but no banks), the beauty parlours, the barbershops. . . and
every club, organization, group, order, union, society, brotherhood,
sisterhood or association imaginable (10).

The novel also focuses on the bitter socio-economic realities faced
everyday by black people in the city where racial violence is
internalized, made visible in the interiority of their lives, lived
everyday. Joe remembers struggling with Violet in their early years
in Harlem, marching in the Armistice parade for the coloured
regiments, and overcoming the “lighter-skinned renters” who wanted
to keep them out of Lenox Avenue’s nicer apartments: “When we moved
from 140th Street to a bigger place on Lenox, it was the
light-skinned renters who tried to keep us out. Me and Violet
fought them, just like they was whites” (127). In an atmosphere of
dispossession and longing people were exploiting each other. The
husband has betrayed his wife but kills another girl for ‘betraying’
him. The wife treats the girl most savagely for dispossessing her
of her husband. Alice Manfred is scared and feels herself “truly
unsafe because the brutalizing men and their brutal women were not
just out there, they were in her block, her house” (74). In her
utter confusion of the life style of black people Alice keeps her
niece away from the “kind of Negro”, “the embarrassing kind” (79).
She cannot make out what made people act so violently? So she asks
Violet, “Don’t they fight all the time? When you do their hair,
you’re not afraid they might start fighting?”(84). Her ironical
comment on the furies and revenges, inflict on blacks by blacks is
noteworthy:

Black women were armed; black women were dangerous and the less
money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose. . . . What the
world had done to them it was now doing to itself. Did the world
mess over them? Yes but look where the mess originated. . . . But
in God’s eyes and theirs every hateful word and gesture was the
Beast’s desire for its own filth. The Beast did not do what was
done to it; but what it wished done to itself: raped because it
wanted to be raped itself. . . . Their enemies got what they
wanted, became what they visited on others” (78).

This passage reflects on the internal conflict that had consumed the
whole community of blacks like the side effects of some powerful
drug which the black people had swallowed in the name of Harlem
Renaissance. The ‘New Negro’ image and its slogan of self assertive
manhood, ashamed the black man in his own failure. Since the past a
sense of lacking ‘something’ is so much dominating in him that the
‘New Negro’ image drowned his manhood and arouse in him a sense of
self doubt and self hatred, which, on the other hand also
contributed to bringing injuries to each other. The narrative voice
replicates on the slavery’s system of disparity in wages between the
male and female workers: “There were bully cotton crops in Palestine
and people for twenty miles around were going to pick it. Rumor was
the pay was ten cents for young women , a quarter for
men” (102). This manner of keeping discrimination between black men
and women not only humiliates the black men but also spurs their
manhood to prove their superiority within their own home and the
relationship between black men and black women worsens.

In her interview with Nellie Mckey Morrison says, “Jazz always keeps
you on the edge. There is no final chord” (155). The function of
jazz is to speak desire and in Morrison’s novel Jazz becomes the
voice of unfulfilled desire. She sees in this unfulfilled desire a
“quality of hunger and disturbance” which is specifically African
American’s and that it is “an ineffable quality . . . that is
obviously black” (153). What is traumatic is not only a sense of
loss but also its reiteration as something lacking/absent that
persists and occupies a palpable emotional space: the presence of
absence. The music that Alice Manfred hears is not “real music –
Just colored folks’ stuff; . . . not real, not serious. . . . It
faked happiness, faked welcome, but it did not make her feel
generous,” (59). The experience of loss is felt not only by
individuals who have been separated from parents, children, spouses,
lovers, but by an entire community who have been uprooted by a
legacy of cultural dislocation. Violet shares with Alice a sense of
stuffy idleness that she experiences in her everyday city life
thus: “We picked cotton, chopped wood, plowed. I never knew what
it was to fold my hands. This here is as close as I ever been to
watching my hands doing nothing”, says Violet to Alice (112). In
the opinion of Ann Douglass “African Americans whose ancestors
were kidnapped from their native land and sold into slavery in an
alien country, were, in fact, America’s only truly orphan group”
(83). While representing the experience of loss, Morrison has
populated Jazz with a number of orphans: Violet, Joe and
Dorcas - who in their sufferings of loss and abandonment also suffer
a sense of lacking, (physical and emotional) because of denial and
dispossession by their parents. Violet became orphan when her
“phantom father” (100) deserted the family to seek his fortune,
leaving his wife Rose Dear, to raise their five young daughters.
Rose, first being alienated from her mother early in her life and
later being separated by her husband, finally could not recover the
trauma of dispossession of her house and land and committed suicide
by jumping into a well. Violet was so moved by her mother’s
distress that she took an important decision in her life, “. . .
never never have children” (102). The decision of remaining
childless later haunts her and creates a kind of “mother hunger” in
her, so intense that she “started sleeping with a doll in her arm”
(129). The sense of loss which was first felt by a daughter inside
Violet later changes into something different, a mother’s
longing/yearning, too intense to overlook. The presence of that
absence becomes so much acute in her that she imagines Dorcas, as a
girl young enough to be that daughter who “... fled her womb?” The
narrative voice speculates the violence of Violet in mutilating the
face of the dead girl as being “a crooked kind of mourning for a
rival young enough to be a daughter” (109, 111). Dorcas Manfred is
raised by her aunt Alice Manfred after her father is “pulled off a
streetcar and stomped to death and her mother “burned crispy in its
flame” (57). For Dorcas, the pain of loss is discerned in her faded
memory of the St. Louis race riots which not only killed her parents
but also preyed her ‘clothespin dolls’(38). Joe trace, being
abandoned by his mother at birth and raised by another family
retains his ‘trace’ (Joe Trace) as his parents “disappeared without
a trace” (124). He makes “three solitary journeys” to find “the
woman he believed was his mother” (175). In the novel Wild who is
referred to as Joe’s mother is present in her absence; “everywhere
and nowhere” (179). This sense of absence and loss in Joe draws him
closer to Dorcas, in whose “faint hoof marks”, “underneath her
cheekbones” Joe traces his mother Wild (130). Dorcas, another orphan
in the novel, in her anguish remembers the “slap across her face,
the pop and sting of it” which was given by her mother to the child
daughter who ‘yelled’ to her mother for getting her ‘box of dolls’
from the fiery house. She can never forget that slap because “it
was the last” (38). Both Joe and Dorcas suffer from emotional
abandonment and in their utter yearning to fill up the gap of
“inside nothing” (37) they try to fill it up for each other:
“Somebody called Dorcas with hooves tracing her cheekbones and who
knew better than people his own age what that inside nothing was
like. And who filled it for him, just as he filled it for her,
because she had it too” (37-38). John Bowlby says that a person who
has experienced a loss “mislocates” the absent figure in some other
figure in his or her life, regarding that person as “in certain
respects a substitute for someone lost,” but for whom ultimately no
substitute can suffice (161). Thus Morrison’s Joe Trace, “a long
way from Virginia, and even longer from Eden” (180), in his
obsession with his mother follows the trail from “. . . where is
she?”(184) to “There she is” (187). The yearning to fill up the
emptiness that the son inside Joe feels, ends up in locating a
wrong figure, in his young lover, namely Dorcas who herself is the
personification of absences. When Dorcas leaves him in preference
for a younger man Acton, Joe shoots her as if to stop the endless
circle of betrayal, caused to black people by the treason of
history. In his bold attempt to stick to his ‘tracks’, Joe repeats
the violence of history and Dorcas has to sacrifice to the
repetition of the process of history. He soliloquises in his utter
disappointment, “In this world the best thing, the only thing, is to
find the trail and stick to it. I tracked my mother in Virginia and
it led me right to her, and I tracked Dorcas from borough to
borough. . . . Something else takes over when the track begins to
talk to you, give out its signs. . . . But if the trail speaks, no
matter what’s the way, you can find yourself in a crowded room
aiming a bullet at her heart, never mind it’s the heart you can’t
live without (130). Another orphan’s story in Jazz is that
of Golden Gary’s. When he reaches the age of eighteen Vera Louis,
his foster mother told him that his father was a “black-skinned
nigger (143). After knowing this he makes his journey to trace his
father in the Virginia woods and finds out the cabin of the woodsman
Henry Lestroy/Les Troy. It is the same Virginia woods where many
years later Joe would search his mother. While waiting for the
arrival of his father, he reflects his feelings on his missing
father in visceral terms as an amputation of an arm:

Only now . . . now that I know I have a father, do I feel his
absence: the place where he should have been and was not. Before, I
thought everybody was one armed, like me. Now I feel the surgery. .
. . I don’t need the arm. But I do need to know what it could have
been like to have had it. It’s a phantom I have to behold. . . .
This part of me that does not know me, has never touched me or
lingered at my side. . . . I will locate it so the severed part can
remember the snatch, the slice of it disfigurement (158-159).

This passage articulates most explicitly the presence of absence, a
sense, produced by a child’s experience of abandonment from parents,
an irreparable loss, cast on African Americans by slavery and its
aftermath. Morrison has articulated that sense of rejection and
desertion, felt by real orphans, so powerfully by such a convincing
narrative that readers can feel that pain and participate in the
sufferings of the characters.

At the nexus of the history of loss lies the history of black women
who suffer dispossession, betrayal, natal alienation along with the
age long oppression of class, race and gender done on black people
in general. According to Grewal, “Jazz highlights the
consciousness of black women’s struggle to survive the violence of
disfranchisement reverberating across generations, across the
North-South and rural-urban divide, a violence that is rendered in
the elusive and mute figure of Wild (123). Wild is also an
embodiment of “the dead girl” about whom Morrison has talked in her
interview with Gloria Naylor. In the novel this mute figure allures
us to follow the trails back to 1873, when Morrison’s Beloved
opens with Seth and Denver as the “only victims” of a “baby’s venom”
and ends in the same year with Beloved’s leaving, taking “the shape
of a pregnant woman, naked and smiling. . . . She stood on long
straight legs, her belly big and tight” (3, 261). In Jazz
in the year 1863, Golden Gray, “. . . a long way from home”, in
search for his father sees “In the trees. . . a naked berry-black
woman” (144) who was covered with mud and leaves. When the woman
sees him she starts running out of her horror and knocks her head
against a tree. Wild’s reaction to Golden Gray is similar to
Beloved’s terror of “men without skin” (Beloved 210). Thus
Wild in Jazz, “indecent speechless lurking insanity” (179) is an
incarnation of African American women who have endured the brutality
of slavery; her muteness speaks of their wound of tongue, harnessed
or clamped by iron bit. She lays bare the history’s wound of denial
and dispossession, done to blacks and particularly to black women.
Even years later the condition of black women do not change. In the
city, after the Reconstruction Violet experiences the exploitative
work conditions; she does not have the necessary license, required
for a beautician and so she must be at “beck and call” of women who
want to have their hair done in return of low wages. The task of
reclaiming ‘Wilds’/black women must be rendered into some
responsible readers who would collect bits and pieces of black
women’s “lived lives” and weave a new story/history by rendering
their imagination into it that would not only heal their wound by
enabling them resist the trauma but also open up a new narrative
technology, based on a negotiation between reader and writer. Thus
a narrative becomes a healing as well as a collective and
interactive project. By setting her story in the Harlem of the 20s,
Morrison reminds us how the movement failed in fulfilling the black
female desires when Harlem itself was an enactment of the fulfilment
of all desires: “. . . it does pump desire”, the narrative voice
says (34). The black women’s age-long hunting for something better
worsens the situation with the physical transference from rural
South to urban North at which they can’t do anything but conceal
their sorrow “they don’t know where from ” (161). In the city the
longing for rest is attractive to Violet, ‘but’ as the narrator
says, “I don’t think she would like it . . . these women . . . they
wouldn’t like it.” That much span of time in the name of rest
though is alluring for these black women, they feel suffocated in
overpowering drowsiness, created by idleness: “They are busy and
thinking of ways to be busier because such a space of nothing
pressing to do would knock them down . . . . They fill their mind
and hands with soap and repair . . . because what is waiting for
them, in a suddenly idle moment is the seep of rage. Molten. Thick
and slow-moving. Mindful and particular about what in its path
chooses to bury” (16). Violet’s “private cracks” is not hers alone
but of all black women’s who endure negligence and humiliation since
ages unknown. Her “private cracks” are part of that “dark fissures
in the globe light of the day.” (22) which is itself “imperfect”;
“Closely examined it shows seams, ill-glued cracks and weak places
beyond which is anything. Anything at all” (23). Violet sees that
she is living other’s life: “In each one something specific is being
done: food things, work things; customers and acquaintances are
encountered, places entered. But she does not see herself
doing these things . She sees them being done” (22). It is
because the globe light of the conscious mind is run by that
dominant ideology that does not see women as its agent. In Violet
Morrison wants to project that self that would be hers own, as she
has said in the interview with Naylor, “I had been living some other
person’s life. It was too confusing. I was interested primarily in
the civil rights movement. And it was in that flux that I thought .
. . there would be no me. Not us or them or we, but no me. And you
knew better. You knew inside better. You knew you were not the
person they were looking at . . . . And I wanted to explore it
myself” (199). Violet’s unconscious ‘stumbling’ into the ‘cracks’
(23) makes her action violent as defacing the corps of Dorcas. But
ultimately her violent action brings the subjectivity for herself
which she can claim as her own. In the later part of the novel
Violet shares her experience of transformation with Felice. She says
that she “messed up” her life by letting the world change her. In
her blind imitation of the image of dominant ideology assigned for
woman she wanted to become “White. Light. Young again.” She forgot
that it was her life and nobody else’s and so she just ran up and
down the streets wishing she was “somebody else” (208). Felice then
asks her what she did to this image and Violet replies, “killed
her. Then I killed the me that killed her.” When she is asked,
“who’s left?” Violet says, “Me” in such way as if “. . . it was the
first she heard of the word” (209). Thus Violet demonstrates her
ability to create herself through the process of killing that part
of her which stood as impediment for achieving that personality. Of
course such transformation for Violet has become possible as a
result of spending some hours with Alice by sharing those fragments
of stories with her who listened to Violet and also told her own and
thus both of them formed a bond between them after the death of
Dorcas. Together they contemplated the travails of black women:
“Eating starch, choosing when to trade yoke, sewing, picking,
cooking, chopping. Violet thought about it all and sighed. ‘I
thought it would be bigger than this. I knew it wouldn’t last, but
I did think it’d be bigger.’” Both recognize tinges of sorrow in
each other. Dorcas’s death, metaphorically, the presence of
absence, which they filled up for each other, brought the two women
closer to each other. As Alice stitches up the torn linen of
Violet’s coat, she listens to Violet minutely and repairs her own
tattered self. The narrator says, “By this time the women had
become so easy with each other talk wasn’t always necessary. Alice
ironed and Violet watched. From time to time one murmured something
– to herself or to other” (112). Thus Morrison in her new manner of
rewriting the history of black women has shown how the solidifying
bond between women can hasten the therapeutic process of healing on
blacks who have been affected by the traumatic effects of
geographical and emotional dislocation, Migration brought for them.
By the end of the novel the wounded triad of Joe-Violet-Dorcas is
replaced by the healing triad of Joe-Violet-Felice. Though the
history of denial, dispossession and depression is almost
unavoidable in the lives of black women they must not allow
themselves to be subdued by its reiteration. The trauma of history
must be prevented from being all consuming. True to the spirit of
the Age is the title of the novel Jazz in which a sense of
loss as well as a note of yearning vibrates and reverberates in its
music, i.e. in its solos, duets, trios; the characters are bound to
it yet they have space to improvise and go ahead of the beat.

Jazz
offers healing to those who survive trauma of repressed past. With
the bond of sisterhood Violet finds out her ‘me’ inside; Alice is no
longer scared of Violet, whom she categorised as one of women “with
knives” (85); Joe is no longer stuck in the track and trails of
“faint hoof marks” (130); Felice is not anybody’s “alibi or hammer
or toy” (222). Thus by focussing light on the interior region of
the lives of black people, as lived by them, Morrison has
represented a “truthful” account of the history of black women in
such a manner which is not predetermined. She is no less faithful
in the traces of the past like TheBlack Book or
Camille Billop’s manuscripts yet in her representation she resists
any single or determined meaning. The unfolding of various strands
of individual stories in the novel is so complicated and varied that
the novel does not offer any single totalizing meaning. In her
Paris Review interview Morrison explained: “It is important not to
have a totalizing view. In American literature we (African
Americans) have been so totalized – as though there is only one
version. We are not one indistinguishable block of people who
always behave the same way” (117). The danger of master narrative
is its grand resolution, in which the outcome has been decided
already and the individual players do not have any role in it unless
they contribute to its predetermined resolution. While filling up
the gap between the master narrative and a ‘real’ account of
everyday lives of the people of her community Morrison relies
strongly on her power of imagination. In the novel the wide gap
between the “slippery crazy words” of the “explanatory leaflets”,
distributed by the demonstrators at the Fifth Avenue march and the
silent staring child Dorcas is articulated in Alice’s attempt to
find out connections:

She read the words and looked at Dorcas. Looked at Dorcas and read
the words again. What she read seemed Crazy, out of focus. Some
great gap lunged between the print and the child. She glanced
between them struggling for the connection, something to close the
distance between the silent staring child and the slippery crazy
words (58).

Morrison’s novel emphasizes the role of narration in rewriting the
history of black women. Though at first the narrator seems to be
overconfident in predicting the narrative action, later the
deterministic nature of a narrative is realized. The narrative
voice confesses how she missed the most ‘obvious’ and the most
‘original’ aspect of the characters; that they are the most
‘complicated’, ‘changeable’ and that the very nature of their
‘humanness’- were all that she failed to understand while ‘meddling’
their lives. Being overconfident of her capability of
‘finger-shaping’ she was quite sure that “one would kill the other”
because “That past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat
itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that
held the needle”(220). Through such narrative confession Morrison
seems to acknowledge that Historical violence can never make life
static and that characters go ahead of History’s age-long treason,
treachery and violence. It is the function of both the writer and
the reader to “lift the arm” of the creative historian/ sociologist
“that held the needle” (220) deep down the grave of things “too
terrible to relate” (The Site of Memory 112) to rewrite the history
of people in such a manner as the narrator in the novel says, which
will be “both snug and wide open” (221). If the focus of the
narrative is to project the damage of history, such confession on
the part of the narrative voice also registers a space for narrative
reparation. In “Art of Fiction” Morrison links the ability
of learning something out of a mistake to jazz as a mode, “In a
performance you make mistake, and you don’t have the luxury of
revision that a writer has; you have to make something out of a
mistake, and if you do it well enough it will take you to another
place where you never would have gone had you not made that error.
So you have to be able to risk making that error in performance”
(116-117). The narrative voice then announces her task of ripping
“the veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate’”(The Site
of Memory 112) through the mute figure of Wild so that an
alternative or counter narrative other than something from muted
perspective can be offered to displace the hegemonic narratives in a
culture’s memory: “I wouldn’t mind. Why should I? She has seen me
and is not afraid of me. She hugs me. Understands me. Has given
me her hand. I am touched by her. Released in secret” (221). In
the attempt of laying bare the wounds, inflict on black women by the
treason of history, the narrative voice urges a space for agency so
that the “Wilds” would not remain speechless any longer. The novel
ends with readerly/ writerly desire: “Say make me, remake me. You
are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look
where your hands are. Now” (229). This talking voice of the
narrative is an appeal to the readers to lay hands on past so that a
new interpretation can be delivered by the joint venture of the
reader and the writer. Thus Toni Morrison’s Jazz registers reader’s
participation in remaking /rewriting social text that resists
predetermined cycle of history.